Liao Zhongkai

Origins and Study in Japan

Liao Zhongkai, whose ancestral home was Chenjiang in Guishan County, Guangdong (today’s Chenjiang Subdistrict in Huizhou’s Zhongkai Hi-tech Zone), was born in 1877 in San Francisco to a family of Chinese labourers in America; Kodansha’s Nihon Jinmei Daijiten gives his birth date as the tenth day of the third month of the third year of Guangxu (23 April 1877). According to the Japanese Britannica, he returned to China in 1893, went to Japan to study in 1902, attended Waseda University and graduated from Chuo University in 1909.

According to the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang (RCCK), he married He Xiangning, daughter of a wealthy Hong Kong merchant, in Guangzhou in October 1897 through an introduction. Global People reports that Liao, then a student at Queen’s College in Hong Kong, had an uncle, Liao Weijie, a director of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, who followed Hakka custom in seeking him a bride with unbound feet; the couple first lived in the attic of his elder brother Liao Entao’s home, which He Xiangning named the “Twofold Clarity Pavilion.” To pay for her husband’s studies in Japan, she used her savings and sold her dowry jewellery, raising 3,000 silver dollars. They had a daughter, Liao Mengxing, and a son, Liao Chengzhi.

The Tongmenghui and the Early Republic

According to Global People, Liao and He Xiangning met Sun Yat-sen in September 1903 at a gathering in the Chinese students’ hall in Kanda, Tokyo; John K. Fairbank also dates their meeting to 1903, after which Liao became a close disciple of Sun. When the Tongmenghui was founded in 1905, He Xiangning joined in August at their home; the RCCK says she then introduced Liao, while the Guangming Daily dates his joining to September 1905. Their Tokyo residence became a secret meeting place for revolutionaries. In the Tongmenghui organ Minbao, Liao translated and published early socialist writings such as Progress and Poverty and an outline history of socialism. In 1909 he returned to Hong Kong to carry on revolutionary work.

After the 1911 Revolution, according to the Guangming Daily, he headed the finance department of the Guangdong military government, introducing a land-deed exchange scheme and reorganising finances and taxation; a note in the Selected Works of Zhou Enlai instead describes him as chief counsellor of the Guangdong governor’s office. After the failure of the “Second Revolution” in 1913 he went into exile in Japan with Sun, returning in 1916. According to Heibonsha’s World Encyclopaedia, he helped found the Chinese Revolutionary Party and the magazine Jianshe (Construction), and served as vice-minister and then minister of finance in the Canton generalissimo’s headquarters. Fairbank writes that in 1911, in 1917 and after 1921 Liao served as financial commissioner for Guangdong, “the chief money raiser of the Canton government,” and had long been a socialist by conviction. Liao hailed the October Revolution as an unprecedented act that shook the world and would surely lead humanity out of darkness.

Detention by Chen Jiongming

When Sun took office as extraordinary president in Guangzhou in 1921, he appointed Liao vice-minister of finance. According to Global People, on 14 June 1922 Liao went to Huizhou at Chen Jiongming’s telegraphed invitation and was detained, then imprisoned at the Shijing arsenal in Guangzhou; in the early hours of 16 June Chen’s forces surrounded the presidential office and Sun took refuge on the gunboat Yongfeng. He Xiangning managed to visit the arsenal and found Liao chained to an iron bed in three places. Meanwhile Chen’s kinsman Chen Dasheng was assassinated in Hong Kong, and Chen Jiongming threatened to have Liao shot in reprisal; Liao wrote farewell poems, telling his wife: “All that follows I leave to you alone; do not fail your name as a heroine among women.” After Sun left the Yongfeng on 9 August, Chen dropped the plan to execute him; He Xiangning confronted Chen in person, and after 62 days in captivity Liao was released and left with her for Hong Kong.

The Soviet Alliance and the Reorganisation of the Kuomintang

After Sun and the Soviet envoy Adolph Joffe issued their joint statement in Shanghai in January 1923, Liao accompanied Joffe to Japan and held talks with him at Atami in February–March to prepare for cooperation with the Soviet Union (according to the Japanese Britannica and Fairbank). That year he became governor of Guangdong and secretary-general of the generalissimo’s headquarters. Fairbank notes that Borodin had found an ally in Liao even before winning Sun’s confidence in late 1923; Liao became Sun’s expert on the Soviet connection and was central to everything Borodin did. In October 1923 Sun named nine people including Liao and Tan Pingshan as provisional members of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee to carry out the reorganisation.

At the Kuomintang’s First National Congress in January 1924, Liao was elected to the Central Executive Committee. When delegates proposed barring Communists from holding dual party membership, Li Dazhao spoke against it and, with the support of Liao and most delegates, the proposal was defeated. Liao went on to serve as head of the party’s workers’ and peasants’ departments, party representative at the Whampoa Military Academy, governor of Guangdong, minister of finance and director-general of military supplies. The Guangming Daily says he helped Sun formulate the “Three Great Policies” of alliance with the Soviet Union, alliance with the Communists and support for workers and peasants; scholars on either side of the Taiwan Strait differ over that formulation (see the entry on the First Kuomintang Congress).

Party Representative at Whampoa

While the military academy was being prepared in early 1924, Chiang Kai-shek left Guangzhou despite Sun’s objections; Liao, acting chairman of the preparatory committee, and Sun sent more than ten letters and telegrams urging him to return. According to the Beijing Daily, Liao wrote on 7 March that the academy was like riding a tiger and that if Chiang did not come he would be driven to kill himself in apology; the entrance examination went ahead on 27 March. Liao promised Chiang: “I will not ask how the academy’s money is spent, and you need not ask where it comes from.” With the Yunnan general Yang Ximin controlling most of Guangdong’s revenue, Liao often waited at night until Yang had finished smoking opium to coax money from him; the cadets’ tuition, lodging, board, uniforms and books were all paid by the government. He came to be called the “kind mother of Whampoa.” According to the CPPCC news site, when the applicant Hu Zongnan was disqualified for being too short, Liao wrote a note allowing him to sit the examination.

Once the academy opened, Liao served as its party representative; all of its rules, regulations and orders required his countersignature to take effect. After the battle of Mianhu in the first Eastern Expedition in 1925, he declared that “our army is now beginning to shine.” Citing Chiang’s diary, Tang Haohao notes that Chiang often resented this check on his power: on 10 May 1925 he wrote that by turning the training regiments into a party army Liao was deliberately guarding against him and stripping his command, and on 5 August that Liao was ignoring the academy’s funds, leaving him “furious.”

The Nationalist Government and the Canton–Hong Kong Strike

Sun Yat-sen died in Beijing in March 1925. When the Nationalist Government was established in Guangzhou that July with Wang Jingwei as chairman, Liao became a member of the government and of the Military Council, and minister of finance. The Canton–Hong Kong strike that broke out in June had the government’s support, and Liao publicly served as adviser to the strike committee; from July the government cut off traffic with Hong Kong and imposed an economic blockade, which the scholar Chen Xiaoping says was carried out chiefly by Liao. In a eulogy after his assassination, Zhou Enlai wrote that Liao died while the government was striving to unify Guangdong’s military, political and financial administration.

Assassination

On the morning of 20 August 1925, Liao rode with He Xiangning and Chen Qiulin to the Kuomintang Central Headquarters in the Huizhou Guild Hall on Yuexiu South Road, Guangzhou. According to Chen Xiaoping, at about 9:50 a.m., as he passed the outer gate and stepped onto the stairs of the inner gate, he was attacked by gunmen and fell; he died on the way to hospital. The RCCK says he was hit by three bullets. Accounts differ on the number of assailants: a Canton report relayed by the American minister said three took part, Global People says four, and Chen Xiaoping four or five. One gunman, Chen Shun, was wounded by Liao’s guards and died on 24 August.

A special committee of Wang Jingwei, Xu Chongzhi and Chiang Kai-shek was set up to pursue the case and given full political, military and police powers; Tang Haohao, citing the meeting records, notes that the arrangement was proposed by the Soviet adviser Borodin. On 25 August Whampoa cadets moved into Canton; according to the report relayed by the American minister, they had “already arrested over one hundred government officials supposed to have been implicated in the assassination of Liao Chung-hoi, including brother of Hu Han-min.” A government order the same day named Hu Yisheng, Lin Shuwei, Zhao Shijin, Wei Bangping, Lin Zhimian and Zhu Zhuowen as gravely suspected of plotting and directing the attack.

The handling of the case reshaped the balance of power in Canton. According to Li Yu of Nanjing University, Hu Hanmin was taken to Whampoa and, nominally on a study tour of the Soviet Union, left Canton on a Soviet ship on 22 September; from 19 September Chiang moved troops to disarm Xu Chongzhi’s Guangdong Army units, and Xu was forced to leave for Shanghai. The result was an arrangement in which Wang led the party and Chiang the army. In 1926 the Liao case tribunal held seven hearings; the prosecutor Chen Gongbo named Zhu Zhuowen and Huang Fuzhi as the chief plotters; Liang Bo was sentenced to death, Guo Minqing, who had issued the gunman’s pistol licence, was executed, and Mei Guangpei was released after paying a fine of 30,000 yuan. In July 1927 the Nationalist Government cancelled all warrants issued in Canton in the case except that for Zhu Zhuowen.

Differing Accounts of Who Was Behind It

At the time, the Canton report relayed by the American minister said that “Members of administration are accusing British of having instigated the plot but many Chinese say that dissatisfied strikers or agents of opposition military leaders were responsible.” The Chinese Communist Party’s message of condolence on 31 August declared the killing a plot by imperialism in collusion with counter-revolutionary warlords, while Zhou Enlai wrote that a vast hidden conspiracy lay behind it. Japanese reference works generally attribute it to the Kuomintang right wing.

The long-standard account names right-wing Kuomintang figures such as Hu Yisheng, Lin Zhimian and Mei Guangpei as the plotters and Zhu Zhuowen’s men as the gunmen. Hu Yisheng, after fleeing, wrote to Wang Jingwei that it would be absurd for anyone to curse Liao in public while secretly plotting to kill him. Wang told the party’s Central Standing Committee on 15 September that Hu Hanmin had known nothing of the case. Borodin told a Soviet delegation in February 1926 that when Hu Hanmin was asked whether Liao should be eliminated he remained silent; Chen Gongbo recorded a similar exchange in his memoir and wrote that it was a fact that an assassination was brewing within the group and that Hu did not stop it.

Zeng Qingliu of the Guangdong Provincial Party School and the scholar Chen Xiaoping argue that Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek used the case to strike at Hu Hanmin’s and Xu Chongzhi’s factions. Drawing on the records of the seven hearings published in the Canton Republican Daily, Chen points out that the only instigator named by the gunman Chen Shun in hospital was Huang Fuzhi, chief of detectives in Chen Jiongming’s Guangdong Army, who was never placed on the government’s wanted list; as for who financed Huang, Chen says no conclusive evidence has yet been found. According to He Xiangning’s granddaughter Li Mei, when she asked her grandmother in 1950 who had killed Liao, He replied only: “the Black Hand.”

Legacy

In 1927 the Zhongkai School of Agriculture and Industry, founded at the proposal of He Xiangning and others to honour Liao’s concern for peasants and workers, admitted its first students, with He as its first principal for fifteen years; it is now Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, which houses a memorial hall to Liao and He. Guangzhou has a Zhongkai Road, and in 1992 his home city of Huizhou established the Zhongkai Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone. Liao was buried in Nanjing; when He Xiangning died in Beijing on 1 September 1972, her coffin was taken to Nanjing to be buried with him, in keeping with their wish to share a grave in death. Their son Liao Chengzhi later became a leading figure in the People’s Republic’s relations with Japan. Ye Jianying once remarked that “the one who truly understood Dr Sun’s ideas on building an army was Mr Liao Zhongkai, not Chiang Kai-shek.”